Higher Education Mergers: The Battle for Crown Jewel Assets
In real time, American higher education is undergoing a major transformation. The King’s College in New York, Fontbonne University in St. Louis, Northland College in Wisconsin, Bacone College in Oklahoma, St. Andrew’s University in North Carolina, and Limestone University in South Carolina announced closures. Inside Higher Ed counted more than sixteen closures of nonprofit institutions in 2025 and an additional eight in the first quarter of 2026.
But the closures are not isolated events. They represent the early signs of irreversible structural changes in the field. The birth rates fell steeply after the recession of 2008, and now the cohort of eighteen-year-olds is entering the university. The Atlantic predicts that the number of school closures may increase from 60 to 120 a year. The same conclusions were reached by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia using a machine learning model. An article published by The Wall Street Journal reports that over 31% of private nonprofit institutions reported losses in fiscal year 2024, and approximately 25% of private universities and colleges are likely to close or merge in the coming decade.
The prevailing narrative depicts higher education mergers as a tale of desperation: beleaguered institutions tying themselves together. This article challenges that idea. The current trend is being done very intentionally by institutions that have the capital and brand recognition to acquire “crown jewel” resources—gold intellectual properties, downtown real estate, a source of clinical projects, and valuable creative networks—from struggling institutions that may not have negotiating leverage to resist.
Breaking the Taboo
Previously, acknowledging consolidation talks was synonymous with disclosing bankruptcy for most of the time the industry has been operational. Since then, this myth has been debunked. According to Inside Higher Ed, the corporate merger discussions have become a staple point on board agendas next to enrollment prediction and investing the endowment.
Robert Kelchen, a University of Tennessee professor noted for his ability to track the merging process in colleges, says that the underlying issues are impossible to avoid. In a statement to the Washington Times, Kelchen argued that “the speed of closures is accelerating because small private colleges are struggling with declining enrollment, rising costs, an inability to increase tuition revenue, and the end of federal pandemic relief funds.” The acute problems of the internal policy are even more evident: some boards of small private colleges are deeply entrenched, yet the constraints of demographics and the infrastructure will push them to act anyway.
All things considered, the outcome is the alteration of the terminology: what used to be called an institutional error or mistake is now going to be referred to as institutional harvesting.
The Geography of Survival: Urban Offense vs. Rural Defense
The geographical positioning of a college is the most crucial factor in deciding if its operations continue, if it is bought by another college, or if it is closed completely. Kelchen’s comment on the matter is the most clear-cut one. “It works in urban areas where we have college acquisitions for real estate,” Kelchen explained in a podcast on education. “Nevertheless, its application is rather impractical in rural areas.” He points to two scenarios in which a merger might work: “One is when the institution is still quite successful. The other one is that this is rather the transaction concerning real estate than the college itself,” he voiced.
This explanation changes the entire trend. In metropolitan cities, institutions that are in danger of closing downturn into nothing but inventory. All characteristics of these colleges can be sold and put on sale separately. In the countryside, none of these features might attract buyers due to a lack of potential buyers.
The Wall Street Journal reported that closures concentrate in the rural Northeast and Midwest, where there are no geographical partners that can take in the troubled institution. For example, when Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, closed, there was no urban buyer nearby, and the local economy suffered due to the closure. The movement is not simply a one-way transition from the institutions of smaller cities into larger institutions in developed cities. Recently, we have begun to witness a reverse trend; well-capitalized institutions from smaller market cities are using acquisitions to plant flags in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Chicago. The focus has shifted from simple enrollment to urban asset density.
Case Study Group A: Capturing Specialized Creative and Academic IP
Northeastern + Marymount Manhattan
In May 2024, Northeastern University announced the purchase of Marymount Manhattan College, which became final in July 2026 as Northeastern University-New York City. It serves as a typical example of the current trend. Yet, the standard description of the matter—a troubled liberal arts school in Manhattan, enrolling 1000 students, saved by the big buyer—misses the essence of dealing with the economic side of the purchase. As stated by Inc. Magazine and Bloomberg Law, Northeastern did not spend cash for the purchase and received a profit of $202.7 million as a result of the deal. It obtained NY real estate worth $215 million, including four buildings with a total worth of 285,000 square feet by the seaside. Furthermore, it assumed a liability of only $68.3 million.
As Bloomberg claims, Northeastern has not acquired a struggling asset. It has purchased a certified institution in NYC able to grant diplomas and maintain its own identity of performing arts education, thanks to several important names (the Judith Mara Carson Center for Visual Arts and the Theresa Lang Theatre). The deal was also important from a regulatory perspective, as Northeastern possessed all the needed approvals that would usually take a great deal of time to obtain.
Seattle University + Cornish College of the Arts
The acquisition made by Seattle University of Cornish College of the Arts, which was revealed in December 2024 and implemented in May 2025, exemplifies the same logic. Cornish had about $10 million in liabilities and witnessed a decline of 38% in its student enrollment compared to 2003.
However, the South Lake Union Campus, which hosts a creative facility next to Amazon’s HQ, has presented Seattle University with something that could not have been achieved through organic growth: years of artistic tradition and facilities for studio, stage, and dance. Higher Ed Dive has reported that Seattle University retained 92 of 127 employees of Cornish College, including 33 out of 40 members of teaching staff—thus gaining human capital along with buildings.
Soka University + Middlebury Institute of International Studies
The same pattern is observed in the field of intellectual property at the graduate level. In May 2026, Middlebury revealed its exclusive negotiations with Soka University of America for the sale of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies campus in Monterey, consisting of all nineteen buildings.
The agreement provided that Soka would continue to operate MIIS’s specialized programs in nonproliferation, threat intelligence, translation, and international policy under the name “Monterey Institute of International Studies at Soka University of America.” An analysis on Inside Higher Ed, which is connected to the transaction, calls it a classic example of the use of “second acts” for closed campuses. The use of the term refers to the process whereby the acquiring party buys the institution’s curriculum and faculty along with its image.
Case Study Group B: Clinical Pipelines and Real Estate Monopolies
Gannon + Ursuline
The merger of Gannon University and Ursuline College, which reached change-of-control status on June 30, 2025, and is expected to finalize in December 2026, is an example of an acquisition in the healthcare field that has been concealed under the disguise of a merger between Catholic liberal arts institutions.
The Breen School of Nursing and Health Professions of Ursuline College is a National League for Nursing-sanctioned Center for Nursing Excellence in the Cleveland healthcare area. Gannon, based in Erie, Pennsylvania, benefits from absorbing the Breen School by gaining an instant increase in the advanced allied health program offerings, as it would have taken more than 10 years to build its own clinical pipeline through program formation, accreditation, and collaboration with hospitals.
Villanova + Rosemont
Villanova’s $40 million purchase of Rosemont College was classified as a real estate transaction, slightly masked as a merger. Bloomberg remarks that the acquisition is simple in definition: it is a 58-acre plot of land on the Main Line, barely a mile away from the main campus of Villanova University. The acquisition of Rosemont follows Villanova’s purchase of the 112 acres of Cabrini University. As a result, Villanova is likely to have its footprint on the Main Line, which will not be possible to establish through the market purchase of individual parcels. Confirming that Villanova will continue using the land for education and housing purposes until 2028, Higher Ed Dive states that the university’s plans of the university for further development will be released at that time.
Overall, both transactions indicate that brand corporations are using the crisis to scale their valuable programs like nursing, medicine, and business and to obtain unique urban and suburban lands at prices lower than their market worth.
Geopolitical Expansion: Coast-to-Coast Market Domination
Vanderbilt University’s expansion strategy is the most extreme among them. In August 2025, the Wall Street Journal announced that Vanderbilt had signed a 99-year lease for the General Theological Seminary at 440 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan, its first campus in New York and outside Nashville, to be opened for students in the fall of 2026. Less than a year later, the San Francisco Chronicle revealed the plans to purchase an entire 4.5-acre campus of the California College of the Arts in Potrero Hill’s Design District, which includes around 750 existing student residences, to open a West Coast campus in September 2027. The WSJ called it a coast-to-coast pincer movement. Bloomberg and Forbes covered the simultaneous negotiations for another downtown San Francisco site.
Columbia University’s approach, while different from Vanderbilt’s, is similar in its effectiveness. Bloomberg reported that Columbia’s Class of 2029 was 20% larger than the Class of 2028. Despite the subsequent trimming to phased three-year growth, the strategic maneuver is evident: elite institutions are not going down with the demographic cliff but are taking the market share from those mid-range private institutions that used to be their direct competitors.
The Public Defense: Consolidations as “Shared Service” Systems
Public-sector consolidation works under different assumptions. In Pennsylvania, the state combined six of its universities into two: Pennsylvania Western University and Commonwealth University, effective July 2022. As of January 2026, the Georgia University System has absorbed East Georgia State College into Georgia Southern University, marking the sixth council consolidation since 2011. In this case, the rationale for merging is like that of corporate mergers: to cut redundant HR, compliance, and IT jobs while preserving the physical campus of the newly merged university as a “lean institutional anchor” of the local economy.
Since 2019, the PASSHE has saved over $430 million, and its first-year enrollment has swollen by 7%, but the impact of the shared-service model has been mixed. Post-consolidation enrollment at PennWest has fallen by 12%. The Chronicle of Higher Education argues that mergers must not be only about getting rid of bureaucrats. The researchers suggest that mergers based on Excel calculations often encounter cultural barriers and have unpredictable outcomes. Kelchen has made a public announcement about the fact that consolidating “failing” institutions with “healthy” ones may create problems for both.
The Modern Hierarchy of Higher Education
The state of American universities is revealing a more unequal situation. As universities continue to close and get bought out by bigger institutions, wealth is shifting from the shrinking middle tier of smaller private universities to an elite level, or higher classification of schools. There are multi-regional elite schools from the Eastern region of the United States, like Northeastern, Vanderbilt, Columbia, or Villanova, which own real estate in urban areas as well as specialized intellectual property, and these elite schools are termed “Crown Jewels.”
There are streamlined public mega-systems like PASSHE and USG. These systems have very minimal infrastructure in the background as they operate on numerous campuses. Like many companies, the next decade will be defined less by which colleges close and more by which balance sheets absorb their assets—and on what terms.